


Five Times Deacon's Brain Was Extremely Unhelpful and One Time He Made It Shut Up

by astudyinpanda



Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 4
Genre: Alcohol, Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Don't copy to another site, Flashbacks, Hurt No Comfort, Implied/Referenced Sex, Injury, Lies, M/M, Original Character Death(s), Smoking, Spoilers, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Unromantic, Whump, sole survivor gender unspecified
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-27
Updated: 2019-02-27
Packaged: 2019-11-06 14:29:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,294
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17941460
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/astudyinpanda/pseuds/astudyinpanda
Summary: Deacon's traumatic past is only rivaled by his traumatic present, but he's still alive to tell the tale.





	Five Times Deacon's Brain Was Extremely Unhelpful and One Time He Made It Shut Up

(1)

"Hey, you heard of University Point?"  
  
That ancient ghoul voice came from one of the Goodneighbor guards, addressing Deacon's surveillance target in front of Daisy's general store. Six words he'd never fucking be ready for were all it took to drop Deacon into a mission-aborting memory. The vault dweller hadn't heard of University Point, but Deacon sure as hell had.  
  
"Ain't surprising," the ghoul told the vault dweller. His voice sounded a million miles away. "The Institute wiped that place off the map."  
  
And Deacon was there, he was _there_ , he was seeing Goodneighbor but feeling everything he felt the night after he put his wife in the ground. When his whole world was ashes. The first day he hadn't felt much, though the rage and despair had been festering in him. That night, he'd wiped out University Point, or at least the people there he'd called friends, before the Institute ever got the chance.  
  
He couldn't do this. Not again, not this hard, and sure as hell not on a bench out in the open with his target ten feet away.  
  
When he dug his fingernails into his palm hard enough to let the pain refocus him, the target had moved on. Anybody could've walked right in front of Deacon and he never would've known, with the past filling his lungs and his ears and his soul.  
  
In a few minutes, he'd wander over to the drifters by the Rexford and see if he spotted the vault dweller on the way. After he got his breathing under control.  
  
  
  
\--

(2)

"I miss the old world." Deacon stood on a helipad, looking west. With Diamond City shining like the mineral version of its namesake, he could squint and imagine all the buildings whole, all the the people indoors and warm on this winter night, doing something edifying. Reading. Watching a sport. Talking about something other than raider rumors and farming.  
  
In the old world, he could've lived like a king, or at least like the power behind the throne. He had a head for history and verse. He could analyze. And if everything he'd read in Switchboard was true, then he would've made a killer spy. With a bit of study, he could learn Chinese. He'd already picked up some Latin and French.  
  
This wasn't the first time he'd caught himself missing times he'd never lived in. The new heavy's old life would've been interesting too, probably, although the formality wouldn't have suited him. He could've faked it.  
  
Deacon shook that dream out of his head. Standing out in the open reminiscing about a past he'd never have was a good way to catch a sniper's bullet. Power armor creaked and he followed the future off the helipad, into the dark.  
  
  
\--

(3)

"I got roughed up," said fucking Fixer, Commonwealth superhero. Or that's apparently the identity that'd been adopted inside that dense heavy head when Fixer donned power armor and waded into a nest of supermutants along one of the Railroad's new "shipment" routes.  
  
If Deacon hadn't come along when he did, that power armor suit would've been Fixer's coffin. The mutants were shooting from all sides, a constant flow of bullets and lasers pouring down at that suit. The armor panels were barely hanging onto the frame. It took agonizing minutes for the broken suit arms to load and fire the nuke that blew all those mutants to hell. Deacon's ears were still ringing when he got to Fixer's side. The heavy had taken what was left of a knee in the midst of the carnage.  
  
What'd really made an impression was the blood running so thick down one armored leg that it dyed the metal black in the setting sun. Deacon had to keep asking "Where's the latch for this?" and "How do you get this piece off?" to peel the suit off Fixer, and then, damn everything, Fixer had wanted to take the pieces back to HQ. "Do you want to live to put this thing back together, or not?" Deacon had finally asked.  
  
Every step back, Deacon's brain kept chanting "Fixer's dead, Fixer's dead, Fixer's fucking dead and this is the end of everything." Aloud, Deacon cracked extra jokes. Even if they didn't ease his mind, he hoped they'd keep Fixer awake. At the volume of synths they were moving, Glory couldn't do all the heavy work on her own anymore. There weren't enough hours in the goddamn day. Somebody would slip up, the Institute would get the drop on HQ, and it'd all be over but the crying. Deacon was going to die at the end of a Gen 2's laser rifle, and so was everyone he remotely cared about, because Fixer put on a giant old world helmet and decided that made clearing a nest of supermutants a solo job.  
  
And then when the two of them finally made it to Carrington, with Fixer hanging off Deacon's shoulders as dead weight that'd make him sore for days, the fucking heavy had the nerve to describe the condition as "roughed up."  
  
For fuck's sake.

 

  
\--  
  
(4)

Deacon leaned on the bar in Mercer safehouse, grinning at his audience and pretending to drink. The Railroad agents gathered around him were looking for wisdom in all the wrong places tonight, namely from him and the contents of their own bottles. But the night was dark and Deacon was bored, so he was obliging them, just this once.  
  
"Anyway, it was getting dark when Fixer and I met a runner in from... Oh, it was you, Foreman, wasn't it?” The woman raised her bottle. Deacon felt like he'd blown a day's worth of luck, having a witness to back up an early part of his tale. Too bad, really. “Yeah, you came to tell us about the package in trouble, but Fixer had an essential, top secret job to do already. Lives in the balance, you know." Fixer had wanted to take that robot with the sexy French accent to Goodneighbor, for whatever reason. These agents, playing in the dirt like settlers when they weren't escorting synths to new homes, didn't need to know that. "So, lesson one is if you absolutely need to be in two places at once and you and your partner are sure you can survive on your own, split up. But be sure about your chances, because of this next part."  
  
Deacon took a real gulp from his bottle to steady himself for the rest. "Lesson two: There is always some bullshit going on north of the Chestnut Hillock Reservoir, west of the city. Always."  
  
"Like what?" Apparently Foreman thought that since he recognized her, they were friends now and she could interrupt whenever she liked.  
  
Might as well skip to the good part, if there were going to be interruptions. "Like this." Deacon pulled his shirt up to reveal an ugly burn scar, mostly healed but still tender, across his stomach and side. "And there's another one like it on my leg, but I'm not taking my pants off tonight." A couple of people made disappointed 'aww' sounds. That was nice of them. Also, there weren't two burn scars. One had been enough.  
  
"Courtesy of raiders having it out with Children of Atom, of all things," he added before they asked. "I'm telling you, it's always something out there. Stay away from the reservoir, if you can. I had to walk to West Roxbury Station like that to clear the route, and let me tell you, it was no fun."  
  
Every step had been a torment. He'd opened his shirt and left it that way, to keep what remained of the right side off the wound. The stimpack had closed up the surface but that burn had gone deep, and his guts were screaming their pain the whole way. By the time he'd gotten to the raiders he'd actually been called in to deal with, the covert approach was not an option. He was hurting too damn much.

He'd called them out of their subway station hideout and then dropped a handful of grenades into the stairwell. The concrete walls kept the blast contained nicely. There'd been a lot of blood.

God damn it, why did he have to remember this shit so clearly? Some days he couldn't remember Barbara's face exactly right, but a pile of gore and torn armor that'd been five raiders? That he remembered like it was still right in front of him. This was why he'd given up trying to help Glory do her job.  
  
He warded off the rest of the Mercer agents' questions and actually finished his beer, and the next one. He'd earned them. He still couldn't sit on a bar stool without feeling like his insides were coming apart.

  
  
\--  
  
(5)

They. Had just killed. A. Courser.  
  
Fixer had been stomping around in power armor the whole time, but Deacon had come in road leathers. When he'd seen just how fast the courser was tearing through the Gunners he'd grabbed one of their helmets, too. It hadn't saved its previous owner, but it couldn't hurt.  
  
If nothing else it'd protect his head from shrapnel when Fixer took out turrets. The courser had just… walked past the turrets. Holy shit.  
  
At the top floor, the courser was interrogating two Gunners. Only the commander was left, gutshot and wrecked from watching every person under his command die, by the time Deacon and the vault dweller arrived. Deacon had been swimming in adrenaline since they walked in the door and after that fight with the courser, and that scene they walked in on…  
  
Deacon got so damned tired afterward that he just sat down on the floor beside the dying commander, knees pulled up to his chest to protect his racing heart. The man glanced over, slightly surprised, but he was in his own world of pain. Fixer found the synth the courser had come here for. Deacon was content to listen in on the conversation.  
  
His hands shook hard as he took a cigarette out of its box and lit it. The faint crackling burn of the first drag helped as much as the smoke filling his lungs. The Gunner commander looked over enviously and Deacon lit one for him too. Why the hell not. At the rate Deacon and Fixer had been traveling, they'd find more old world cigarettes.  
  
The Gunner commander had "O+" tattooed on the left side of his forehead in neat black ink. Sweat was trickling over it, down his face. He took a drag and heaved a trembling sigh. "Thanks, private."  
  
Shit. He thought Deacon was a surviving Gunner. The combination of the right hat and a dying man's hope made a better disguise than Deacon would've guessed. "Yes, sir," he said, because he couldn't just let an opening like that pass. Literally, he couldn't. A better person would have.  
  
Despite how exhausted Deacon felt, he was simultaneously still wired, on edge. To distract himself from his own mess, from how much like a person that dead courser looked, he wondered what a Gunner private would do in this situation. Rock back and forth to use up that nervous energy, maybe. Deacon tried it. It felt natural.  
  
"When you can, you report back to the plaza for reassignment." The commander grunted in pain. He wouldn't make it there himself.  
  
"Yes, sir," Deacon said again.  
  
He had exactly one stimpack left. If he saved this guy now, he'd just end up killing him later. Maybe a better person would've done it anyway. Deacon didn't see a point to that. By the time Fixer had sent the escaped synth on her way, Deacon was feeling a little better and the commander was dead. On his way out, Deacon took the rest of the commander's cigarette back before the Gunner's uniform caught fire. No sense wasting that, either.  
  
  
\--  
  
  
(+1)

"You didn't have to reach around, you know." Both of Deacon's hands were still clenched on the bed frame at the end of the bed in a Hotel Rexford room. His pants hung around his ankles and his shoes were still on.  
  
Fabric rustled behind him, between him and the door. "It feels better when the other person's coming too," MacCready said.  
  
" _That's_ your kink? Making people come?" Deacon couldn't help smiling, because that was just too cute, and also MacCready's whole face went pink when he got mad. He turned to watch the mercenary pull his clothes back on. It'd been a long time since Deacon had felt so thoroughly fucked, in a good way, at least. Hate gave MacCready a hell of a lot of energy, and he was still young enough to keep his dick up despite the alcohol. There wasn't a negative thought in Deacon's head right now. It was a minor miracle.  
  
"Shut up." MacCready tugged his hat down until the brim's shadow hid his eyes. "This is why nobody likes you." He slammed the door on his way out. Whoever had been trying to sleep in the room next to Deacon's groaned.  
  
Deacon fell back onto the bed, laughing quietly while he took off his shoes. Some people liked him just fine. Those were exactly the relationships he didn't want to mix sex into. Even if his partner could make uncomplicated love, Deacon's brain just couldn't. He'd tried a couple times. The catastrophic during-and-aftermath weren't worth the good parts.  
  
But this, this was simple. This was peace. Because MacCready could take his hate out in productive ways, and some quirk of honor kept him from stabbing Deacon in the back afterward. This wouldn't be the last time Deacon talked the mercenary into putting something other than his mouth and his rifle to good use.


End file.
